Sorry about the whole, “What do you wanna do? I dunno, what do you wanna do? I dunno what do YOU want to do?” section. Usually we go in with a plan. Or at least, a clue. We usually go in with a plan (even if Josh doesn’t tell us the plan) but in this case we couldn’t come to any agreement. We argued about what to do next, then said, “Screw it, let’s just do the episode.” Sometimes this leads to interesting commentary. Sometimes it leads to… this.

And yeah, before you correct me, the Boomers came from a vault and not the base.

This is the slow part of the game. You’re presented with a handful of tribes, and you have to either ignore them, or do a quest to fix their internal troubles. (And maybe exterminate them? I’ve never figured out of extermination is formally recognized by the game.) Some of the tribes are fun, and a couple are annoying. There’s a little bit of something for everyone. The Boomers are the most time consuming of the bunch, although they also give the best benefits at the end of the game.

And yeah, I was just trolling Rutskarn about the Cowboy Repeater. I only used it once. I wasn’t particularly impressed with it, but it’s not like I did a detailed analysis of it against the other weapons so I don’t know that it’s a particularly weak weapon. I mean, who has time for that sort of study when you could be effortlessly punching dudes to death?

Yep, it is. I used my cowboy repeater on my Guns character from about level 4 to level 12. I upgraded it a couple times though. You can make it reload faster, be a little more accurate and lighter weight.

The thing that makes them good for so long is that they’re easy to keep in good repair. You find lots of them on legion troops. I think I got my first one in Nipton.

You’ll be finding better guns by level 10, but they wear down quickly and have to be repaired by an NPC if you don’t have spare parts.

The cowboy repeater used to be a decent early game weapon for gun-centric characters – Relatively low damage, but you could fire it very quickly. It’s a little wonky to use in first person because of the firing/reloading animations. Apparently they slowed down the firing rate in the last patch, so it’s a thoroughly gimped weapon at this point.

They did buff up “That Gun”, which is one of my favorite weapons in the game…

Is Josh still carrying that fucking incinerator around? I’m currently working on my hardcore mode playthrough of the game (fifth playthrough… Jeez, that almost hurts to write…), so I haven’t been watching every episode of this season, but if he hasn’t done it yet could someone make him sell that thing? It’s painful to watch.

Is it possible that this is going to turn into the ultimate troll of the series?
We’re gonna get to the end only for Josh to say something along the lines of “wow I still have this thing, why did nobody mention it?”

If you do the Bugging quest after House dies, apparently his own antivirus software kicks in and the Follower lady (who’s also the one who programmed Yes Man) just goes “Hey, we got a sign-OH GODDAMMIT!”

You can stack a hell of a lot of food item yeah. With high survival, a lot of the things you can make at a campfire heal for a good bit too (up to 15 health per second for the best of them IIRC). Med-X plus Slasher gives you damage reduction 50% I believe, so it is theoretically possible. On the other hand your limbs are almost certainly going to get crippled, stock up on doctor’s bags.

The thing I hate about the Boomers is that there’s no way to investigate them without blithely completing all of their quests. The head woman says something along the lines of “Go do some quests to earn the trust of everybody” and I was thinking “Hey, how about you do something for me to earn my trust; the only thing I know about you so far is that you tried to blow me up with artillery for getting close, you psychopath.” And the more you investigate them, the crazier and less trustworthy they seem. The last part of the quest chain is to get them a plane so they can fly around and bomb whoever the hell they want, which, no thanks, why would I want to give them that? Except, as far as I could figure out, there’s no way to resolve the quest except by doing that.

Oh, and I almost forgot; the constantly call you and everyone who isn’t a Boomer a savage, despite the fact that their entire society is built around blowing things up for no reason and there’s no way to call them out on that fact. God-damned savages.

No, the cuftbert way is to keep it for yourself. But don’t put any skill points into piloting. It becomes a kamikaze attack when he tries to eat fifty foodstuffs at once at the controls before running back to the bombardier’s spot. Of course, he’d survive by virtue of sheer dumb luck, only to be killed by a peeved housecat.

Well, it’s a lot of hoops to jump through, but worth it. They may call everyone else a savage, but if you help them get their B-29 they’ll like you so much, they’ll basically volunteer to bomb anybody you want them to. So, explosive obsessed nut-cases, but they’re your explosive obsessed nut-cases.

Edited to add: This isn’t much of a Cuftbertian option. It’s long and tedious and you don’t get to blow up as much stuff yourself.

YES! That’s so true! Boomers piss me off almost as much as the kids from Lamplight.

And there is no option to call them out on their crap! They keep talking about how they are superior and everyone else is savage, but they kill everyone who tries to approach them with explosives and think nothing of it! They’re gun-crazy fascists! I just want to scream at them: “Look at yourself! You’re the savages! You’re fascists! You murder innocent people with HOWITZERS! Acting so high and mighty, while your only accomplishment is finding an ancient plane you want to use to kill everyone you don’t like, but can’t even fetch because you’re suddenly a lot less scary when you’re not sitting on enough cannons to hold off the entire army of China! The Followers are helping destitute people and spreading knowledge, for free! WHAT DO YOU DO?!?!”

The entire faction just makes me angry! And the irony of it is, they’re one of the few factions in the game you can’t easily kill off once you reach a certain level. And, at the same time, one of the few factions deserving to be put down, like the mad savages they are.

The big difference between the Boomers and the kids at Little Lamplight is that the Boomers actually make sense. They took the store room of their vault by force because that’s what an experiment creating a bunch of gun nuts and then telling them they can’t have guns results in. They then took a violent stance against absolutely everyone who at the time were primarily tribals before finally settling at Nellis (since it was untouched for fear of radiation). Since then they’ve been unaware of the wasteland outside Nellis and are paranoid. Getting to Nellis is a real pain and the Boomers may grate on some players, but at least it makes sense for them to exist in the form they do unlike a camp of kids in an otherwise childless wasteland for 200 years with no possible way for the population to continue to exist.

Oh yes, I agree that the concept makes sense, and is actually quite interesting, it’s just that the Boomers’ overwhelming arrogance, coupled with my inability to call them out on their hypocrisy, grates me to the point of shouting obscenities at the screen.

Nah, they aren’t too bad. The biggest issue arises when one of them spawns with a Fat Boy. Or two do so. Missiles are really easy to dodge and fire fairly slowly, and regular bullets aren’t too much of a threat either.

As much as I disliked the Boomers though, I found the introduction to the Brotherhood of Steel to be much more frustrating. Although I now understand there are ways to meet them without being screwed over (Veronica), my first time meeting them left me really annoyed. I had ED-E and had recieved a transmission from them inviting me to go to their base, which I did and then they stripped me of all my weapons, asked me what I was doing there, which the game did not permit me to answer truthfully and then strapped a fucking slaver collar to my neck and forced me to do some bitch-work for them. I wouldn’t have minded so much if they had apologised for it later in a sort of “You know how it is, we can’t be too careful” way but they don’t mention it again and there’s no way to even be rude or short with them other than not doing any of their quests. I think it was the ED-E thing that really bugged me though.

Shamus, I approve of genocidal playthroughs (then again, who cares about my approval!). It’s actually pretty interesting, since you cannot offload your tremendous piles of loot from cleansing all those towns onto a previous town; you have to find a non-murdered merchant first… And preferrably one that doesn’t detest you.

Works better if you don’t know where to find the loaded merchants, of course.

Oh, and by the way? I found nine unmurderable entities, if memory serves. Fairly short playthrough, comparatively.

Ouright murdering every named NPC of a faction is enough for at least Yes Man to be okay with it. Haven’t tried with other endings, but I expect it to work there as well.

Well, take out the Boomers’ leadership is a specified optional choice for completing the Legion variant of the quest. Don’t recall it being marked as an option for the NCR version (although I’ve yet to do an NCR playthrough).

The Gunrunners’ Vendortron is a handy location to offload your loot…and yeah…a genocide run is fun…doing it myself, although it is on hold right now…

The Tribes quests can be solved by killing the respective leaders by yourself…actually I didn’t even know you could send Securitrons there to do the wetwork…but then again I haven’t really investigated all that much…wetwork is so much fun ^^

Because shopkeepers don’t work that way. I think not even travelling merchants have their entire stock actually in their inventory, but I might be wrong.
Regular shopkeepers have an invisible Bag of Holding which has their entire stock.

No idea about the Cowboy Repeater. The Courier is an Energy Weapons gal. She comes from a long line of Energy Weapons spcialists. The Warrior, the Chosen One, the Vault Dweller… None quite as good as the Vault Dweller (Turbo Plasma Rifle was a BEAST), but there it is.

Btw, there’s a second path to the boomers. An underground passageway. Pretty sure it’s littered with traps and Feral Ghouls, but that DOES seem more Reginald Cuftbert style…

Let’s not forget the doors with Very Hard-difficulty locks to get inside. It’s a bit of a bummer for low level PCs since it’s hardly ever the first skill you’re going to max and about the time you can get the quest, you’re around the same levels as Reginald is now.

The problem with this is that lockpicking becomes an essentially useless skill as soon as they let you just apply an existing combat skill to opening locks. That’s why you can’t blow open chests/doors/etc. Explosives lets you pass some skill checks and improves your skills with some weapons. If it let you open locks as well, there would be no point whatsoever in lockpicking.

The only way to “balance” it would be to give it a prohibitive cost, and since the economy is so borked in this game that would be really difficult.

Well D&D games just add a random chance of destroying some or all of the items stored in a container if you force your way into it.

It doesn’t even have to be that expensive, most of the time you destroy minor stuff like scrolls and potions, but just the simple notion that I accidentally smash a “Longsword of Flaming Icy Death +150” drives me nuts.

There are lots of metal doors in new vegas,so the option to blow up wooden doors would be both welcomed,and easy to balance.Plus,there are very few places where you could do it without anyone noticing.

A lot of the time it doesn’t matter if anybody hears you. Abandoned faciilities, chests in caves, places where all the occupants have already been filed under “future murder victims”. In a large majority of the game “stealth” isn’t a thing you have to care about, so “unstealthy” isn’t a real drawback.

And one thing is that no door NEEDS to picked. Any plot/quest required door can be bypassed somehow, with a keycard or the like. You can beat the entire game with no training in lockipicking at all, and that means that any door out there with a lock above “very easy” is pretty much just a perk of training lockpicking. Since lockpicking has no conversation skill checks and no combat use, the ONLY use of lockpicking is to open those doors/chests/etc.

That’s why there’s no other way to open those. Because adding that ability to any other skill would be a disincentive to invest skillpoints into lockpicking.

There is no use for speech other than in few conversations,that only give you some bonus,and arent plot essential,yet there are numerous places where speech check can be bypassed by other skills(explosives,sneak,barter,….)or some item you found/thing you did.Yet it is still a fun thing to have.So why not do the same thing with lockpicking?After all,the best thing about the game is that there are numerous ways around various obstacles,so why is introduction of new ways to some obstacles a bad thing?

Just guessing but the biggest reason to not have something like doors you can blow open is because it doesn’t exist in the engine currently. I’m sure it could be implemented, but considering the buggy product we got at release I doubt it would’ve been a good idea to go adding things to the engine. That’s one of the issues when developers are working with someone else’s tools on a time constraint… come to think of it, it was mentioned in a past episode that Ballistic Fist and Displacer glove should use ammo, I’m guessing that they fall under the same category of Obsidian not wanting to (or having enough time to) make changes to the engine as it was for FO3.

Why not go check on tabitha if you dont know what to do?Its always cool to hear her ramblings.

Yeah,that artillery thing irked me as well.The game offers you so much different ways to do everything,and then here is a part which you must do this one way and no other.Well theres the underground passage,but still it only leads you nearer the base.Its irritating.

Okay, wow, Yes Man is my favourite character now. Plot exposition that doesn’t try to hide or retcon your choices, and has a plot-able reason to give you all the exposition.

You should’ve chosen “I’m… not proud of what I’ve done, I’m trying to change, really.” I mean, for Cuftbert, it probably is still technically lying, but the game wouldn’t have given you the penalty to it. :p

Also, fits in with the fact that you killed the Legion – that should be on her good side, no?

Cass is really only happy with a goody-two-shoes positive karma courier. She’s one of the few NPCs that seems able to see your general karma meter — everyone else goes off their faction, but she doesn’t have a faction.

But (spoilers) if you do her quests, she’s pretty cold-bloodedly homicidal.

I actually really hated this, my first play through of rpgs is always the “do what it takes to get the job done” type character and I had accumulated a lot of bad karma from botched missions and stealing everything. Cass is the only character who follows the morality meter and the game doesn’t seem to let you know that she uses up the three chances to be good whenever you talk to her. The first time I had her I lost all three chances trying to talk about her quest.

There aren’t many murders that move your karma either way (though I think the fiends and maybe another faction that you can’t actually talk to give you positive karma). Most karma comes from theft/break-ins and since Cass was a caravan owner I suppose it makes sense for her to object to actions that would be harmful to caravans (i.e. theft).

Personally I hated the Yes Man thing…not himself, but that I am forced to work with him to rule Vegas on my own…he is always needed as a quest trigger, I can’t just go around and save the world without asking him for permission (at least that’s how it felt for me)…he tells me what to do…and I have to go back to him for quest rewards/XP…the only difference between working for him or house is the narrated ending…I would have loved to be truly independent…just do my thing…sure, there must be some kind of trigger for the Legion’s attack on Hoover Dam, but I think it could have been handled better than Yes Man…

That trigger is called ‘The NCR is still breathing.’ There’s no storyline NEED for Yes Man other than that devs can’t trust the player with real freedom. I maintain that Yes Man is cool – but a truly independent option would have been a good addition. Portray the Courier as King of Vegas in the end credits, ruling according to however his actions painted him through the course of the game (a use for the karma meter!).

The idea is that you’re simply using Benny’s plan, which was to use House’s plan. The courier really doesn’t know enough to get all the tribes in the right position for him/her to rule the Mojave. I see it as Yes man simply giving you the information you need for you to do what you will. This is evidence by the fact that you don’t actually have to do anything other make contact with the tribes which makes sense since it’d be stupid not to be aware of potential threats to your power. That said I suppose they could go one step further and just let you skip straight to the battle but end with a non-standard game over (the tribes/factions you didn’t do anything about do various things that result in your ultimate demise… that’d be pretty cool actually).

They did do one with dead money. I personally love the idea of rather than just saying “You died. Let me reload that for you.” something actually happens that makes the player sit back and say “Wow I really screwed that up.” New Vegas actually does a pretty good job of letting the PC screw themselves out of story lines My first play through I killed the singer in Novac making the Strip shun me before I got anywhere near it, just because I thought “This guy expects to die… I’ll oblige him.” Yes Man seems to be the only thing they don’t let you lock yourself out of. Different endings for different karma are closer than we get from the vast majority though (like if you’re a psychopath and take over New Vegas it’s a pretty bleak outlook for the future). I guess there’s just not as much surety of high profits if you take big risks anymore though since it seems like everyone wants to recreate the success of popular franchises by simply copying them.

The Witcher series seems to have the best approach to choice by not having immediate repercussions but having a circumstance much later play out differently.

Umm. Doesn’t the Yes Man effectively betray you at the very end, though?

For one, installing him on House’s mainframe gives him the chance to self-reprogram, and at the very end, after the big battle when it’s final speaky time, he says that he’s going to take a few days (or was it a longer time?) closed off from you to remove his inhibition to say ‘yes’ to everyone.. So he pretty much says ‘thanks bud, now I’m in control and soon won’t have to take orders from you’.

Only problem with that is it would make the ending completely obsolete. It wouldn’t really make sense anyway unless he somehow found a way to overcome his programming without the game ever even hinting about it. I mean, he’s programmed to help anyone who he might be working with. Installing the update is something the original Yes Man just would never do, assuming he was well aware what the update might do to him.

On the other hand it makes perfectly sense if he’s working with the idea that by getting that upgrade he can serve you better since he’s well aware of the glaring error in his programming, as evidenced if you ask him about it. He deemed it a liability and decides it’s best to get rid of it.

I have to admit though that it’s pretty vague what the “little more assertive” actually means, but I’m just trying to go with what we know about him, rather than make wild guesses. Otherwise, it’d be the worst freaking plothole I’ve seen for a while.

It’s not the given ending that bothers me, but the many implications about that little part of dialogue you get before the ending slideshow begins, like that it meant that it’s Yes Man who ends up being in charge and the various theories on what will happen afterwards.

The ending makes no mention towards anything like that whatsoever and all credit is given to the Courier. All Yes Man ever gets is a mention about having aided the Courier.

On the other hand I wouldn’t really feel comfortable with having the Yes Man run the daily management of New Vegas, controlling the securitrons and such if all it took to take over would be for someone to get within earshot of it and say something like “So, care to tell me how I can get rid of that annoying Courier guy?”

I took the whole thing to mean that Yes Man would make it so he doesn’t listen to anyone BUT the Courier. It wouldn’t take a high intelligence, high science Courier to do it since Yes Man knows HOW and HAS to obey orders. You could just TELL him to listen to no one but yourself.

I’m amazed. 42 comments and not a single mention about Shamus’ accidental asterisk instead of an open parentheses in that first paragraph? I wouldn’t have pegged that getting unmentioned for the first 5 comments, much less almost 50.

I think the Yes Man does recognise if you kill the leaders of the minor faction. so technically, all you have to do is cut off the head. And anyway, you don’t have control of the Securitrons under the fort until Hoover Dam, and supposedly the ones in New Vegas are barely enough to keep control. So sending them on raids on major factions might be a bad idea.

One thing I liked my first playthrough is if you speech check Benny into going into the presidential suite right away and you go up and talk to him, he legitimately sounds like he’s giving you another quest-line. He’s all like “Yeah I’ll give you a special jobs and pay you a retainer for each one” or something like that. Then you an chose whether to partner up with him or not. I did the first time because it fooled me. He walks out and I’m busy looking around the suite for items and his guards walk in and attack me. I could’ve loaded a save, but I felt I had to give the game respect on that trickery so instead I played on killed the guards and found him at the fort later.

“Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice…shame on me some more, because I fell for the same thing twice.”

I mean, the game opened with him shooting you with a bullet to the head immediately after you were helping him out dig a grave of sorts. That’s not exactly legit.

Even still, if it was legit, it reeks of Ezio from ACII:

“Oh no, Rodrigo Borgia, I can’t kill you – it won’t bring my family back. I’m above killing for petty revenge, despite having literally killed at least 50 people over the course of the game solely because you were at fault and I needed to get to you so I could kill you. Now I’m not going to kill you because I’m above all that.”

Compare to:

“Oh no, Benny, you shot me in cold blood after I *helped* you dig a grave, then I went and chased you halfway around Nevada trying to get to Vegas to chase you down and kill you for killing me, but now I’m just going to do your questline, because I’m above petty killing, despite almost certainly killing 30 people on my way here.”

It’s things like this that make me rage at so called “moral choices” in video games – while I personally choose “good” choices, This would be like making peace with the Reapers at the end of ME3 – no ideas, Bioware. Give me a choice in how they die, but don’t try and make my character choose between killing them and saving them. Well, unless its “kill them” or “enslave them”. That would work I suppose, though it seems VERY unlikely to work.

The guy’s got charisma. Perhaps a little too much. I got fooled by the prez suite thing, just because he persuaded me that it was the sort of a “nothing personal” thing for him to kill me.

Heck, later on, when I found him at Kaizar’s place, I was going there thinking “I’m gonna burn him, and then beat him with a stick, and then feed him to dogs, and then find a way to bring him back to life just to kill him again, and then…”, but after I’d talked to him, I ended up helping him to escape.

Hmmm that’s an interesting interpretation of the beginning of the game. If I remember the first time you see yourself you’re tied up lying on the ground with the Khan’s digging your grave… seems pretty clear you’re not helping him to me… maybe I’m wrong.

It’s perfectly reasonable to listen to what he says. The courier has no clue what’s really going on at this point unless you’ve spoken to House first (I never did, that close to Benny I wasn’t about to be sidetracked). The courier wouldn’t trust Benny up front but given the opportunity to hear him out without his guards is reasonable, as is the offer he makes if you take it to be legitimate. I mean having shot you in the face and then seeing you standing in front of him, he’s surely freaked out and realises the courier is bloody hard to kill it makes sense to try to convince the courier to work with him (if you can’t beat ’em…).

I went directly to Benny too, and while I could smell he would betray me, I felt forced to fell on it anyways because I didn`t have sneak to get holdout weapons into the casino, and my speech sucked, so no convincing him of going upstairs and kill him with my bare hands.

Really? I’ll have to watch the beginning again, because I sworn it was intended to be you who was doing the shovelling. Perhaps it was just the fact that you appear upright when he shoots you in the face.

And um, at the least, it seems like betrayal of some sort, because otherwise, how did you get there?

Planting the bug after you’d killed House? Yeah, doesn’t work. I tried it, hoping I could give the Followers House’s entire database in a gift-wrapped stack of holodisks, but the quest plays out exactly the same. There isn’t even an option to tell that woman “I AM THE HOUSE! Wanna tour my ivory tower?”. What a ripoff.

All a man needs is his .308 hunting rifle and possibly a light automatic like a 9mm submachinegun for quick clean up. It’s all a man needs.

…Although whenever I play a guns character I end up carrying around a fucking armoury worth of guns anyway.

I need the .308 for generally shooting everything, the varmint rifle has been with me since the start of the game and has the cool scope now (suddenly I’m attached), the anti-material rifle? Well what if I need to shoot all the life out of absolutely anything? Need it. This Machine is required because you never know when you might have to storm the beaches at Normandy. The Light Machine gun? Look buddy all this 5.56mm ammo ain’t gonna use itself.

Then I’m suddenly also carrying around three different revolvers, two sorts of pistols. Except it’s actually three pistols and two of them are the same, it’s just that I like the scope on my 9mm pistol but I can’t not use Maria but I can’t put a scope on Maria.

…What’s this now? Marksman Carbine? I need this, no I really need this gun. Oh look it comes in a special camouflage variant too.

Oooh and a sawed off shotgun. And a pump action shotgun. Oh my.

At this point in the game I’m carrying around so many friggin’ guns I haven’t got any space left for loot. Truthfully I’d say the Marksman Carbine is the only gun in the game you need, but you get access to it so late in the game I’m sticking with just the .308 and submachinegun if I can.

I remember when I first showed up to Vegas, I went to the casino with the white glove society, and they were being pompous and all “I will have to take your weapons, plebian.”

My courier was all “if you respect me, I’m your best friend. If not, you are sooooo screwed” and, well, let’s say the White Glove Society ended up kind of… dead. The other casinos didn’t have this problem as no disrespect was presented.

Very dead.

Room-by-room exterminated, even.

So, this actually really sucked. This was faaaar before Yes-Man was all “hey go check out the tribes” and by the time that actually happened, there was no way to finish that quest. I hadn’t “investigated” them so I couldn’t “ignore” them. I eventually had to open up the console, reset several global variables, reset (and re-do) several quests (including the “investigate the tribes” in which I had saved the White Glove Society for last since I was procrastinating in a “well this isn’t working, I’ll figure it out later” kind of way), and had to respawn a number of the WGS.

After FINALLY getting the “ok, you can ignore them!” thing, I went back and remurdered them all. I HATE the White Glove Society SO MUCH.